Samsung finds an answer to LG's OLED

The world's biggest TV maker, which has struggled to make OLED screens big and long-lasting enough to be used on TVs, says it has hit upon a technology it's calling MicroLED, which it says will have all of the advantages of OLED with none of the disadvantages.

OLED, or Organic Light Emitting Diode, is the technology used by LG, Sony, Panasonic and others to make high-end TVs that have superior blacks, and arguably richer colours, than the more traditional LCD TVs sold by Samsung.

It achieves blacker blacks because each pixel on the TV is its own light source, meaning pixels can simply can be turned off to create perfectly black areas in the picture. LCD TVs, on the other hand, create black by blocking out light that comes from a light source behind the pixels, but because LCD panels can't block out 100 per cent of their backlighting, blacks are never fully black - unless they're far enough away from light areas that their backlights can be turned off altogether.

But OLED suffers from burn-in and fading, where pixels on the TV can start to fail if they've been left on for too long. As with the older plasma TVs, OLED TV owners complain that network logos, or even Netflix messages, can remain on the screen permanently if they walk away and accidentally leave the TV on the same picture for too long.

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(LG, the main manufacturer of OLED panels, currently solves the burn-in problem, not by fixing the faded pixels, but by fading all the pixels on the TV so the faded ones are no longer noticeable. But it argues that, even with naturally and deliberately faded pixels, its TVs will still be viewable for as long as LCD TVs are.)

Samsung says its MicroLED panels, which aren't expected to appear on the market until later this year at the earliest, use the same technique as OLED to achieve perfect black, but because they're made of regular, inorganic light-emitting diodes (LEDs) rather than organic LEDs, they won't burn in or fade with usage.

At the Consumer Electronics Show here in Las Vegas, Samsung showed off the first TV that will use the new technology, the modular TV known as "The Wall", that will come made up of small panels of MicroLEDs, that can be put together to form TVs as big as 146 inches.

Just how long it will take Samsung to put the MicroLED technology into smaller, more affordable TVs, or indeed whether that's even possible, isn't clear. Officials say more will be revealed when The Wall TV is formally launched in March. Until then, not even the price of The Wall, nor how big each panel is, will be revealed, a Samsung official told The Australian Financial Review.

The MicroLED technology, which Samsung says was inspired by the LED displays used in huge billboard TVs, uses arrays of tiny LEDs to create its pixels. Each pixel is made up of three LEDs – one red, one green and one blue – and it's not clear whether Samsung has yet managed to make the LEDs small enough to squeeze 24.9 million of them onto, say, a 56-inch UHD panel.

It might be that early MicroLED TVs will only come with an HD resolution, rather than UHD, for regular-sized TVs. March will be telling.